The Worst Journey In The World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Memoir of a survivor of the Scott expedition to the South Pole.
I'm really behind on bookthoughts, I've got this increasing pile of books I read and never got around to thought-ing, so I'm going to start sending scrappier thoughts than planned in order to clear the backlog. Sorry? Not sorry? I don't know what you freaky weirdos are looking for anyway, maybe this is good for you.
I'm getting mildly obsessed with the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (early 1900s), I think because it feels uniquely human-scaled: these people were doing something incredible and unprecedented, but also intelligible on a human level, something pre-mechanical. (I read somewhere that the Heroic Age was anachronistic even its own time, I really don't know enough about the history of technology to understand if this is true, but it's interesting).
It's also surely relevant that this is something that happened right on the cusp of modern life (and modern photography!). Here's ACG at his typewriter, or Lawrence Oates (as in the "I'm just going outside, I may be some time" guy) in a sweater.
I'm also finding it interesting to read such a clear and human-level example of "contested history", in the sense that there seem to be two opposing camps of people who think that
1) Scott got unlucky -- the weather conditions were worse than he could reasonably have expected, and his instructions to send a dog team to meet him on the way back weren't obeyed
2) Scott was bungling, haphazard, planned poorly and the whole drama + loss of life was completely preventable if he'd just planned things better.
I do not know which of these are true! i'm still trying to figure out how I could disentangle competing accounts on this without ultimately just trusting one writer (or camp) over the others -- I don't know if it's possible for me to figure this out of my own accord, and the process of trying to do that in this small constrained example feels meaningful in relation to, you know, figuring out how to figure out your view of the world as a whole.
Related but also regardless, I think there's an equally-interesting story to be told about the rival expedition of Roald Amundsen, who reached the pole a month before the Scott expedition and returned with his whole team seemingly-smoothly and safely. I don't know much about him, and am hoping to read more about him soon, but for now I'll just mention Cherry-Garrard's aside: "let it be confessed we all underrated Amundsen;" "the truth was that Amundsen was an explorer of a markedly intellectual type, rather Jewish than Scandinavian."
Basically, one theory on Wikipedia is that "Scott was the better wordsmith of the two, and the story that spread throughout the world was largely that told by him, with Amundsen's victory reduced in the eyes of many to an unsporting stratagem" despite the fact that Amundsen seems to have been a stand-up human from everything I've seen so far.
But another theory that my friend suggested is that nobody cares about Amundsen because he just did the thing, in a straightforward and uninteresting way, potentially through competence and good planning.
And both of these stories strike me as really plausible -- that history is written by the writers, and that history is written by the people whose misadventures were dramatic enough to make a good story -- and both seem to have big implications for how to understand the world.
p.s. Related and interesting reflection from someone else on the same book: how the Scott expedition and others in the 1900s had a worse understanding of scurvy than explorers had in the 1700s, at huge personal cost https://www.idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
p.p.s the title of the book comes from a trip Cherry-Garrard and some others made to collect penguin eggs, before the main expedition to the pole: "Cherry-Garrard later referred to this as the 'worst journey in the world' at the suggestion of his neighbour George Bernard Shaw," and then used that to name his book.
